One of those millions patents out there covers also this and have been used to stop competition in the market already. That is where I took the idea.

Btw, you could encrypt those data and send them safely through an unsafe channel (mail). Dunno whether that passes said regulation.

I don’t know where you came up with the idea that you can’t send medical data over the internet, my clients do it every day. The reason you can’t send it via email is because by HIPAA email is not considered safe, while FAXes are, although there are systems that use email to send the FAX.

As one who works in this arena everyday I have found this discussion interesting but flawed. The average mortal has no idea of the train wreck that is soon to become of medical care in America and EMR are just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, you can not write it unless you want to a.) risk a costly lawsuit or b.) pay absurdly high fees on that patent. Do not expect such systems to become cheap anytime soon.

I also asked my pharmacist about computer generated prescriptions. “They’re legible”, I was told. And my urologist was able to get my unnecessary CAT scan at his desk with a few clicks. It was amazing as our my dentist’s x-rays.

We need to have computers do diagnosis as doctors cost too much for routine care.

Computers in medicine are working well. Lawyers on the other hand are disasters.

For example, 10 years ago NASA started to panic and pulled people out of retirement because they no longer had the machines or the people with the expertise to repair the machines (such as align heads) of computers that used magnetic tape. Much of the data for the Apollo missions was on the medium of magnetic tape, but there wasn’t the expertise to read it.

In my life I have seen cards, magnetic tape, 8″ floppies, 5 ‘ 1/4 floppies, 3.5 ” floppies, CD’s, flash drives, solid state drives, etc. (Not to mention the various interfaces of something simple like a HD. (Anyone want a 30 meg RLL drive? I have one.) )

My point is that in a lifetime, a person will see a myriad of storage devices for records and the conversion from one media to another media to be able to read the data has to be a factor in the costs of something like this.

Bob

I have to agree. I cannot understand how something so obviously ill suited to the actual needs of doctors and patients ever made it to the market.

I had an annual check up with my doc. It had been a while so for some reason, I was a ‘new patient’. I had to fill 6 pages of paper work.

One of the test he wanted was a colonoscopy (hurts getting old). That meant a referral to another office associated with the same hospital. They send me ANOTHER packet asking for the same information. “Can’t you use the records I already gave to Dr G?” I asked. “Nope”

Sigh. OK. Another half hour of paper work for what ends up being a 5 minute preview of the procedure.

Now I am told to go online and enter all my data a third time for the benefit of Surgical center it will be performed at.

Wasn’t the big idea that there would be easy access to this info by the doctors that needed it?

No wonder the profession had to be forced and bribed to do this. And business that tried rolling out this sort of time wasting as part of an internal procedure would not do well in the marketplace.